Dovetale
1. Focus on a clear and unique program pitch
Your Community should be aligned with your values and uniqueness. A great place to start is with your product/ service. Think about what already makes your product brand unique and how you can extend that to the uniqueness of your future community.
2. Community Diversity
Don’t just use the same ‘types’ of people. Diversification of communities can help make your community more powerful and accepting. It can also provide a testbed for additional or new target markets.
3. Create Ongoing Opportunities
Answer the question: How do I create value for each of my members? A clear distinction between successful e-commerce communities and non-successful ones is consistent and new opportunities. Your team should be meeting once per week to discuss how you can make your program different and exciting. In addition, your team should be thinking about how to increase value as there becomes new members. New members should exponentially increase the value of your community.
4. Gamification
Creating tiered systems and goals to work towards can help amplify your reach and incentivize members to be active. The idea is to help members feel as though this isn’t ‘work’. Some ideas include:
- Tiered gifting and earnings structure: If members hit a certain number in sales or conversation consider putting a ‘bounty’ on earnings tiers.
- Give members the opportunity to invite other people and reward them for members that are a good fit.
- Create opportunities for collaboration where members can get paid or earn higher fees when creating content.
5. Provide Exclusive Opportunities
Ubiquitous discounts, offers, engagements, and gifts offered to ‘non-curated’ members dilute the value of intimacy that can be fostered for members who take an interest in promoting and participating in communities.
Consider variant gifting: giving members a choice of rewards they receive makes them feel as though the gifts were their choice.
6. Create Passive Income Opportunities
Consider paying certain members a retainer (a regular monthly/ bi-weekly payment). It can be a really powerful way to show members you value them and can also help set expectations. Adding additional incentives such as gifts, rewards, and commissions can largely increase member activity - passive earnings can tie in nicely with your incentive and reward programs in #4.
7. Educate your Community
Dovetale can help! Teach best practices and provide resources to help community members stay involved. Also, get community members involved in the process for promotions - a lot of them may have grown audiences before and their methods may resonate with their own fans. Some community members can be great content creators, great at promoting or buying ads, or simply helping your brand tell your story.
Why Community Needs to be In Your Header